Cancel culture

I was 14 or 15 when I first read Ray Bradbury, which is not a bad age to enjoy the man fully. It was the short story ‘Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar’, in which a lad called Tom does just that and it doesn’t end terribly well. Superficially, it is a silly story, but what hooked me from the outset was the vague yet pervasive sense of unease running throughout this minor small-town saga, disturbing the comfortable ennui of family life. Nothing spelled out — just a deepening disquiet, the common thread in all of Bradbury’s finest little vignettes. Back then, in the 1950s, the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear annihilation were hovering in the background, just beyond the edge of our eyesight, which perhaps explains the author’s state of mind.

Grammy award-winning singer Billie Eilish became the subject of an attempted cancelation this week after a TikTok user posted a video showing Eilish lip-syncing along to a song that uses the anti-Asian slur 'chink' and speaking in an accent critics allege is meant to mock Asians. Eilish said in a statement that she mouthed the lyrics along to the rap song when she was '13 or 14' and 'didn't know' that the word was derogatory toward Asians. She nonetheless apologized, asserting that she is 'appalled and embarrassed' to have used the word. Eilish also denied mocking an Asian accent. [caption id="attachment_26543" align="alignnone" width="398"] Billie Eilish's apology (Instagram)[/caption] https://www.tiktok.com/@lcxvy/video/6973327620473670917?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.etalk.

The saddest, strangest thing about the ongoing saga of Chrissy Teigen is that Teigen herself doesn’t seem to realize what sort of saga it is. The swimsuit model-turned-influencer evidently believes she’s on a hero’s journey — the tragic sort, yes, but a hero nonetheless. The arc is familiar: from hubris to hamartia, peripeteia to anagnorisis. First the pride, then the fall, then, eventually, redemption and a rise from the ashes. But is the tale of Chrissy Teigen that kind of story? Teigen, a key figure in so many online draggings over the years, should know better.

If you've spent any time in the land of online controversies this week, you may have heard that Ellie Kemper, the effervescent star of Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is in some scandalous trouble. ‘Oh great, Ellie Kemper is yet another rich white celebrity with a racist past,’ reads a headline at the AV Club, while Page Six crows, ‘Ellie Kemper once crowned queen at ball allegedly linked to white supremacy.’ The outrage stemmed from photos of the 41-year-old actress as a teenage debutante in 1999, when she participated in a debutante ball in her hometown of St Louis, Missouri — an event rendered automatically suspect to a certain subset of internet users given its location in a city below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Cancel culture, I’m sure you’ve heard, is everywhere. Not a day goes by without some sorry sap being caught out for tweeting The Wrong Take, wearing The Wrong Clothes, using The Wrong Word. It’s not just a cottage industry: the entire digital media ecosystem is predicated on cancellation: pick your target, call them out, watch them burn and reap the rewards. Does it have to be this way? What if we didn’t all get mad — we got even instead? What if everyone was equipped with the same tools as the online witchfinders general who police popular discourse? Almost everyone has been on the internet long enough to have something on there that could hurt them. If everyone was canceled, perhaps no one would be? Let’s call it the Cockburn guide to mutually assured cancellation.

Discerning cancellation connoisseurs so far have overlooked one of the most problematic boy bands of the 20th century — and it's time to change that. The American disco group the Village People features a cast of empenised individuals donning costumes that glorify toxically masculine tropes of the time: a police officer, a cowboy, a construction worker, a sailor, a biker and, bizarrely, a Native American (more on that later). This mono-gendered depiction of the local proletariat is laughably outdated. While some might say the only thing lesbians are actually good at is running nonprofits, today we know that Sappho’s daughters are just as good as men, probably better, at chasing down perps, roping steer and erecting skyscrapers. But let’s look at the music.

Dr Seuss books are getting canceled and I couldn’t be more envious. Earlier this month, the Seuss estate announced that it would discontinue publication of six of the author’s beloved children’s books after consulting with shrieking activists. The reason was that some of their illustrations depict blacks and Asians in offensive and outdated ways. From there, the flimsy dominoes of corporate America began to fall: eBay banished the titles from its online store; Universal Orlando announced it was ‘evaluating’ the theme park’s Seuss Landing area. All this is bad news for one of America’s most imperishable literary icons. Still...have you seen those book sales? In the first week of March, the top 10 children’s books on Amazon were all by Seuss, as were 23 of the top 30.